there is no darkness but ignorance
by Shadowed Voices
Summary: Tarsus IV, a simple farming colony of 60 years with a mostly human population of nearly 10000 people. It's a place for relaxation and escape. Then the blight came and nearly 2000 people - those already elderly or ill - starved to death despite rationing. Supplies were limited, the government was toppled, and a new power rose. When he was done, there were barely 4000 people left.
1. Scotty

**Chapter 1: Scotty**

Montgomery Scott knows that Starfleet lets kids enlist as young as fourteen these days and he's a good year above that restriction when he finally publishes the Aberdeen Solution - most of the work for that was spent drafting and redrafting the actual words that other people needed to pad the science and math; his literature teachers have always despaired his inability to reasonably construct sentences on paper - but he decides not to accept the offer to join up when it comes. High school, boring as the material is, is not nearly as time intensive as the Academy would be and Scott gets to spend his time tinkering with advanced engineering and physics theories in his backyard or hanging out with his friends. It is during this time that he may or may not build a miniature transporter in his room so that he doesn't have to stand up to get food.

He graduates high school soon enough and the offer comes again. Admittedly, Scott really wants to get his hands on a working warp core generator. He holds off though. He's seventeen. He has all the time in the world. That, and he's neck deep in designs for a small spacecraft that's looking more and more like a pleasure yacht for deep-space travel. His friends drag him out for drinks they're not old enough to have and that's fun, so he builds his own still in the backseat of his car, attends a few parties, has a girlfriend or two, and attends college. He graduates when he's twenty-one. Starfleet hasn't been particularly subtle in their attempts to recruit him, but he's has just enough rebellion in him that the continuous pushing is more than a little grating.

Progress with the yacht has stalled for the moment so he diverts his attention to a little theory that's been knocking around his head since he maybe build the miniaturized transporter and emerges six months later certain that transwarp beaming is definitely a thing and he's going to prove it. The thing is, his neighbors are, _apparently_ , a little fed up with all the explosions, generator noise, and bright lights at all hours. One of his friends suggests that he takes a trip to this colony her cousin moved to a few years ago. Wide open spaces for experiments and unlimited time to work with. He's still getting creds for the Aberdeen Solution, has a good deal saved away, so it doesn't take much to pack up and head out to the tiny little rock in middle of nowhere space called Tarsus IV.

Scott spends his twenty-second birthday getting a little too drunk and needs to be chased out of the engine room of the ship he's taking to Tarsus no less than thirteen times.

As it turns out, the inhabitants of this colony are a little tech-shy, but that's fine. Getting the parts he'd need to play with the physicality of the transporter would be an expensive pain in the ass and with the ion cloud mucking around with communications, it's probable half the orders wouldn't go through. He doesn't mind much. The nearest settlement it a good six months away - middle of nowhere space - so he has no excuse to try testing his half-completed formulas for transplanetary beaming and even less of an excuse to attempt beaming things onto passing ships, simply because there are no passing ships. It gives him time to play with the math.

Scott doesn't spend all his time spray painting equations in the grass around his tiny shack of a house, though, and that only happened _once,_ thanks. There's a couple of bars in town that he visits semi-regularly for warm meals a beer or two. He's passing drinking buddies with most of the locals and a surly kid who's only excuse for not going back to Earth is that space is disease and death wrapped up in cold and dark, and he is never getting on another ship ever again. It's hilarious and Scott maybe gets way to much pleasure battering the kid with his yacht plans. He drags the kid back to his place for his twenty-third and learns that he's only eighteen and probably shouldn't be drinking, but that stops neither of them in the face of good whiskey.

The next year, the kid's nineteenth birthday is spent horrifying him by showing him the miniature transporter that he uses to artificially age the whiskey he makes with the still. They get very drunk that night. Maybe it's the alcohol, or perhaps the math and the company, but it comes as no surprise to Scott when it's the kid that sidles up one day saying that the crops have been hit hard by a fungus that rotates though every handful of years. From what the locals say, it's hit at an awkward spot in the growing season - too late to replant the last crop, but far too early to plant the next one - but it's nothing to worry about. They'll be handing out ration cards in the next few weeks, just in case.

Scott is twenty-four years old, human, male, and has been healthy his entire life. He's a college educated engineer who, while usually working on something a bit obscure, is perfectly willing to help fix a tractor or some other bit of farm equipment for a meal and a beer. He doesn't have an arrest record or any outstanding payments, and the worse anyone has to say about him is that sometimes he'll get drunk and do math all over his front lawn. His ration card, when he receives it, is green.


	2. Bones

**Chapter 2: Bones**

Leonard McCoy stops trusting the world when he's seven. It's the middle of summer and the sun seems to be doing it's best to set all of Georgia on fire the way it beats down. The temperatures aren't even dropping at night. He's staying at his aunt's house for the summer because his Momma is in the hospital for the third time this pregnancy and his Poppa is getting called all over the planet for doctoring things. It's not bad. For all that Leonard's a city kid, he loves his aunt's house on its acres of lush green grass and the apple orchard out back. He and his multitude of cousins - this appears to be the summer of sending kids to relatives houses - have free reign of the land.

It's brilliant.

One particularly hot day, ten-year-old Cynthia declares that they should make a raft and take it down the creek. She is the oldest of their little group, the same as Leonard and cousin David are the youngest, and is usually the one to make all the big decisions about what they should play. Everyone agrees. Their older cousins, the teenagers, have been telling them stories about doing the same thing, and it's not like the kids haven't been playing in the creek all summer. So they take some old boards and rope from the barn, and gather fallen branches from the orchard, and manage to argue together a rickety little raft that just barely holds all of them.

Bonus: it floats.

So the five kids play around with the raft, dragging it over rocks where the creek is shallow and having fun trying to balance when they're actually over water deep enough that none of the raft is touching the bottom. They don't notice when the creek widens out or gets consistently deep enough that even Cynthia would be able to stand on the bottom and still be underwater. They can all swim anyway, because no one unable to swim was allowed in the creek.

They do notice when the creek spits them out in the Chattahoochee River and that's when things start to go wrong. They're miles from home and the river here is fast and deep, sweeping the suddenly panicking children and their rickety raft farther downstream. Downstream, where water churns foamy white around the boulders that line several sharp and terrifying drops. The raft, held together with luck and childhood dreams, come apart under the onslaught and only four children wash up on the shore.

Leonard spends the night in a hospital for the first time, attends his first funeral, and returns home to a baby sister who will never get to meet her big brother's best friend.

When he's nine, his family moves from the high-rises of Atlanta to a small house with a single stall and paddock out back. He receives a horse for his tenth birthday. He treats her like she's made of gold, brushing her every day and riding whenever the weather permits. He keeps his grades up only because those are the conditions of keeping her. When he's eleven, cousin Cynthia drags him out of school early and dares him to eat some alien meal that involves live food. After he's finished vomiting up anything he's eaten ever, she tells him that she's joining Starfleet just as soon as she's old enough. A few months later when the adults start asking, Leonard says nothing about where she's gone.

Cynthia took David's death the hardest, after all.

Leonard graduates early and spends his first semester in college poking at the sciences before finally deciding to follow his father into medicine. The medical school he wants to get into is quite competitive, so he takes the initiative to sign up for an internship that sends students to work on isolated colony worlds in exchange for college credit and work experience. This is where he learns that he suffers from aviophobia and absolutely loathes space travel.

Working on Tarsus IV where he is assigned is pleasant enough. The doctor there was just going to have him doing paperwork and the like, but Leonard knows a lot about medicine from his father and is a quick study on his own, so he's bumped up to unofficial nurse with the stipulation that patients get to choose if they're comfortable with it. The tech out here can be a bit fritzy, even the higher quality medical equipment, so Leonard learns natural remedies from little old ladies who have lived on this rock since the colony was founded, learns how to splint sprains and set bones when the regenerators aren't working. Sutures become his specialty along with cheering up kids with the sniffles.

Mostly he deals with the sniffles and patches up this one kid who apparently doesn't know how to stop getting into fights. He likes the work he does, feels accomplished at the end of the day, and doesn't take the first ride back to Earth when it's offered.

Somewhere in there, he makes friends with an eccentric engineer who makes moonshine whiskey in his living room and uses homemade transporter tech to turn it into liquid ambrosia. The guy's a nut who won't stop talking about the deathtrap he's planning on building or the insane theory he's going to kill himself proving, but they wind up spending at least one evening a week together. It's why he tells the man about blight when no one else has seen him for several days. No one seems worried about it. The little old ladies Leonard makes tea for say that this sort of thing happens every once and a while. It's no big deal.

Leonard is nineteen, human, male, and with the exception of a few horse related injuries and a near-death, river induced nasty childhood flu, has been healthy his entire life. He has experience as a doctor and, while he has a habit of having a drink at the local bar while being underage according to colony law, he's never been arrested for it. His records are clean. When his ration card comes, it's green.


	3. Spock

**Chapter 3: Spock**

S'chn T'gai Spock has identified as Vulcan for his entire life, genetics aside. He is Vulcan. He was born on Vulcan. He attends a Vulcan academy. He follows the Vulcan teachings. His father, too, is Vulcan, as is his brother. No one contests that fact. However, many other Vulcans - his classmates and teachers specifically - are under the impression that having a human mother makes him less than Vulcan.

Spock cannot find the logic in this.

Yes, his mother is human. She was born on Earth to human parents who raised her in ways befitting one of the many human cultures. She attended human schools. Her first language was a human one.

Spock can acknowledge that he is half human, genetically, because that is true, but that does not make him any less Vulcan. He was raised Vulcan.

That his classmates continue their attempts to garner emotional responses, pushing him by stretching truths and implying a lack of worth, after their initial attempt failed is illogical. It is also illogical that his teachers will meet his every success with the amendment that his functioning is somehow impaired by human genetics.

Bullying, his mother calls it. Discrimination. She faces it as well, but being fully human, overt acts of discrimination such that he faces at school are viewed as xenophobic, which is even more illogical.

Spock spends his childhood in an awkward gray area of not-Vulcan-not-human and subsequently spends a great deal of his non-academic time meditating in the mountains behind the estate. His father reprimands him every time he returns home for dinner.

Before Sybok left, he would spend the evenings teaching Spock how to wield his telepathy without needing touch as a medium. After he left, Spock continued to hone the skill by either looking for or warding off wild animals during his trips into the mountains. He only realized how proficient he had become when he accidentally felled a le-matya instead of just running it off.

This is why, when the bullying, as his mother calls it, turns physical and his classmates insult his mother, Spock reacts physically. He has the necessary control to hold onto his baser impulses, to restrain his emotions behind shields, but he is used to reacting telepathically when threatened. He knows that, should he react in the manner he is accustomed, his classmates will be grievously injured. Physically, however, Spock is ten and small, taking after his mother's more delicate bone structure than his father's at this point, and the worst damage he can do in a fight is minor bruises or lacerations.

The choice is logical.

He is suspended, pending expulsion. On the other hand, now that everyone is seemingly aware of his un-Vulcan-like reactions, they are content to leave him alone for the majority of the time. During his suspension, his father brings him along for a diplomatic journey to Earth. They spend two years there, which, while not unpleasant, are cold, damp, and crowded. Spock, used to the mountains and the quiet solitude he found there, would rather be back on Vulcan.

Interestingly, the humans find him far more Vulcan than his classmates ever did.

Despite how illogical it is, Spock finds himself longing for the independence he used to have while also enjoying the freer learning environment that comes with not living on Vulcan. He posits to his father that, since he is well ahead in his schooling, that he would be better served learning about other cultures first hand to aid in his future choice of applying to either the Vulcan Science Academy or Starfleet. His father agrees, stipulating that his mother must also agree, and that they will be returning to Vulcan before Spock sets out on his own.

His mother agrees. Grudgingly.

Spock is thirteen when he sets out for the first planet he plans on visiting. He spends six months there, returns to Vulcan for approximately ten days, and spends another six months at a different location. He spends three months at the next planet before moving on, not finding the environment agreeable, and spends the remaining three months recovering on Vulcan. While on Vulcan, he tests out of several advanced classes, not having fallen behind at all during his travels, and updates the books on his padd. He also takes the time to research how isolating a group from the parent culture can result in a shift. He informs his parents that he will be visiting several smaller colonies of cultures he has previously visited to see how they differ. By the time he's fifteen, he's the furthest he's ever been from home on a planet known only by its star and number: Tarsus IV.

It is a farming community with a small town at the center and an estimated average of ten thousand residents at any given time. The vast majority of people living there are families who plan to settle permanently on the colony world. The next largest population consists of transient and semi-transient scientists and college students. The remaining population is made up of the elderly first settlers and a reform school on the outskirts of the town that uses manual labor in the form of farm work to aid the underage students in resolving their delinquency problems. Approximately one percent of the total population is non-human.

Spock takes up residence in a small apartment within the town and spends most of his time studying the differences between those who live on farms and those who live in town. He notes that both groups look down on the reform school, but the farmers are slightly more lenient. He also takes note that the human population has an illogical habit of discriminating against the non-human population. It is not enough to be overtly antagonistic, but if a store owner is speaking to a human acquaintance, the conversation will often continue far longer when a non-human customer is waiting for assistance than when a human customer is waiting. The more human-passing the non-human is, the shorter the wait is. Spock, for instance, will receive assistance far sooner than the single Andorian family would.

For the first two weeks of his stay, Spock does not interact with the residents of the colony outside of daily basic needs and his studies. Then he comes across a boy who introduces himself as JT when he stops by the local clinic to ensure that the local doctors has information relevant to treating Vulcans. The boy is arguing with an older teen, an apprentice doctor by the look of things, about the necessity of "kicking that dick's ass, because he belongs in juvie, not a reform school," while the apprentice puts sutures in a large gash in the boy's arm.

This is not his last meeting with JT. Subsequent meetings result in JT punching someone much larger and older than both of them for making racist comments about Spock, before grabbing Spock's wrist and dragging the surprised Vulcan halfway across town by way of previously un-utilized back alleyways. After than encounter, they wind up in Spock's apartment more often than not, JT scouring Spock's old lessons and assignments like someone starved for information.

"The school teaches to the lowest common denominator," JT explains once while methodically working his way through astrophysics. "They don't have the resources for anything higher than Algebra, intro to Bio and Chem, and some basic composition classes."

Spock hears of the blight by way of the colony-wide announcement. His only semi-regular contact is JT, who is locked in the school five days of the week and spends the vast majority of his time getting into fights. He receives his ration card the same as everyone else.

Spock is half-human, half-Vulcan. He is the fifteen-year-old son of an ambassador. His records indicate that he has been traveling on his own for the past two years without any misdemeanors to his name. He does not cause trouble within the colony wither. He is healthy, but, as a full-time student, does not do anything to contribute to the community at large. His only known acquaintance attends the reform school. His ration card, when he receives it, is yellow.


	4. Kirk

**Chapter 4: Kirk**

Jimmy's first language is sign, baby signs for hurt, tired, play, hungry evolving into phrases, sentences, paragraphs as his coordination improves. He exchanges a trach tube for a face mask, but keeps his PEG tube for food when he's moved out of NICU and into a pediatrics room. There are three other children around his age with him, most of them bed or wheelchair bound. He knows doctor, nurse, patient, boy, girl, brother, grandpa, learns name-signs and kid terms from a girl across the room who signs because she can't hear.

He's two years old and learns to read because he's not old enough, strong enough, healthy enough to play with the other children. He can't sit up on his own long, can't be let out of bed. But, he can scroll through a child-locked padd with thousands of picture books. He signs the stories to the girl when she rolls her chair carefully across the aisle to the foot of his bed. She's four and can't read yet, but that's okay. As time passes he goes from signing a few pages to one story, two, three before needing to rest.

He's two years and three months old when the doctors start weaning him off the machine that pumps oxygen into his lungs. His chest hurts and he stops breathing because he has to think about it, think about moving his chest up and down and it's exhausting, but it's worse when he forgets, when he's distracted and almost passes out before a nurse rushes over with a mask. He's never had to breathe on his own before. It's hard and scary and he hates it. It scares the other kids too, like the girl across from him, which might be worse.

He's two years and eight months old and breathing consistently they begin easing him into eating and he has to learn how to swallow, chew, eat. The flavors - the girl says their boring, dull, plain, flat - are overwhelming to his tongue. He works his way from liquids to soft foods to solids. The scars in his throat from the tracheostomy make things challenging.

Jimmy is three years and five months old when he first speaks out loud, propped up on pillows of his hospital bed that has been his home for most of his life.

His nurses cry when he says hello, good morning, voice mirroring hands that have known the words for most of a year. They cry again when he's sent home for the final time, three and a half, Tiberius Kirk rolling up to the hospital in an antique car with Sammy in the back.

Sammy and Grandpa Ti know sign, learned right along side him in the hospital when Jimmy was a baby and no one knew if he would ever be able to live off the machines. Being home long-term is a wonderful new adventure. Grandpa Ti and Sammy aren't careful about where they keep the padds. The computer is always logged on. There are books, endless shelves of books on everything imaginable. Jimmy grows stronger dragging ancient text books off the lower shelves, climbing to his feet with the steadying help of the table and chasing after his brother. He's sick, constantly, outside the sterile environment of the hospital, but he pets a cat for the first time and gets bruised playing with other children.

Jimmy is three, four, five and still uses sign as his main language, only speaking out loud when he really wants someone's attention because it hurts his throat and it his tongue trips and stutters, too slow to keep up with his mind. Sammy is seven, eight, nine and never gets mad that Jimmy catches up to him in school work within the year, that he has play gently because Jimmy is still fragile. He speaks and he signs and he listens when his baby brother explains algebra and quadratics and the beginnings of physics while Sammy works on geometry and literature.

Grandpa Ti is old, older, dead and Jimmy meets his mom for the first time. She sweeps in like a hurricane, packing the boys away from the funeral. Grandpa Ti's city apartment by the park is traded for a dusty farmhouse out in the cornfields of Iowa. She sweeps out just as quickly. Jimmy and Sammy are left with Uncle Frank and the memory of a crisp Star Fleet uniform and blonde hair.

Jimmy doesn't like Uncle Frank. He doesn't like him first because he's not Grandpa Ti, but he understands death - the boy two beds over at the hospital died in his sleep, no reason, just died, and his biofunction monitor screamed loud enough to wake all the kids in the room - even if he doesn't like it.

He's hospitalized three times that first month for allergic reactions. Jimmy is five and he knows his medical chart inside out and backwards. He knows what he's allergic to. He knows the scientific name of every food, pollen, and medication he's reacted poorly to. He knows he gets colds every time it rains and catches the flu even if he's vaccinated. His immune system teeters on the edge of compromised and overreacting most of the time, but he's allergic to immunoboosters. He learns to watch what he touches because Uncle Frank doesn't.

Jimmy learns the first stirrings of resentment.

Sammy is smart. This is known fact. He's nine and fluent in sign language, ten and tests out of elementary school, middle school, and starts breezing through high school courses. He has Winona's hair and eyes, Grandpa Ti's face. He's good at sports, when he has time to play. He's eleven and interested in medicine, good with smaller children, and doesn't come across as a smartass when talking to adults. He's fourteen and graduates, starts college with a scholarship the school practically begged him to take. Uncle Frank totes him around like a prized dog. Look at my nephew, George Kirk's son, Winona Kirk's son. Isn't he wonderful? So smart, so talented.

Sammy tries, but apparently the riles for Jimmy are different because Jimmy is different and Uncle Frank does not like that. At five, Jimmy is small, quiet, and moves too much. He stutters when he speaks. He can't run or play rough. He gets tired and cries when he's frustrated. He takes things apart to find out how they work. Jimmy isn't something to brag about, which makes him a burden on Uncle Frank. Uncle Frank does not like burdens and does not like Jimmy.

Jimmy learns this before he turns six. He learns to not like Uncle Frank back, because Uncle Frank isn't something to brag about either. The other kids in his class - kindergarten, everyone learning to count and spell their names, and Jimmy wants to die - talk about parents and siblings with glee. Uncle Frank slaps Jimmy's hands when he signs instead of speaks. Uncle Frank calls Jimmy stupid when he stutters, calls his a useless klutz when he falls, calls him retarded when his feelings boil over into tears because he can't do anything else to express them.

Jimmy is six and learns the feel of a slap and a shove. He learns to shut up, to keep his hands still and quiet. He goes to school and learns that the other kids are mean, that they don't understand physical limitations. He goes to school and learns that other kids are - not stupid, that's what Uncle Frank calls him - slow. They take forever to learn anything. Class time drags on at the pace of cold syrup - a, b, c, d - a is for apple, e, some apples are red, r e d - one plus one is two, two plus two is four, three plus three is - and Jimmy could prove that he's faster than this, could prove that he's like Sammy, smart and fast and pulling ahead, if anyone would just take the time to listen!

No one wants to listen. Jimmy is six, seven, eight and he learns how easy it is for resentment to twist into anger, rage, hatred. He stays up late and does Sammy's work in the dead of night, fingers quick on a padd where he still struggles with writing. He gets into his first fight when one of the other boys calls him stupid like Uncle Frank does. He gets into another when he sees someone picking on a smaller kid. Then another and another. Always another fight and he learns to grin with blood on his teeth. He punches someone in front of a teacher - the jerk deserved it, but doesn't get in trouble because apparently physical altercations are worse than slowly degrading a child's mental health - and is suspended for a week. He's ten and finally, finally at a similar speed to the rest of his age group and the teachers start paying attention.

Or, rather, one teacher does. She catches Jimmy with Sammy's second padd during lunch one day and watches as he breezes though calculus and astrophysics and star charts. She gives him a placement test. Jimmy shares a secret smile with Sammy when she yells Uncle Frank into letting him test into high school.

Jimmy is ten like Sammy was when starting high school. The classes still move too slow - Jimmy learns that boredom is destructive, as do his teachers, but they won't let him move up again citing emotional and social development - but most of the teenagers tend to leave him alone. Sammy just graduated, so the teachers know his name, know the stories Sammy would tell of his brilliant, flighty little brother. The other kids are older. Most don't give two shits about the ten-year-old genius. He stops getting into as many fights at school and settles into a twitchy restlessness during the daylight hours.

Home is still an issue.

Jimmy is eleven and Sammy is living in a dorm at college when Uncle Frank progresses from a dismissive slap to throwing his nephew clear across the room. Six years he's been yelling at Jimmy to speak up, bruising Jimmy's hands when he tries to sign, and now he shouts about mouthy brats who don't know when to shut the hell up. Jimmy hits his head on the door frame and lays there, stunned, for several minutes before dragging himself into his room.

He start showing up to school with bruises again. He already has a reputation. People already know he gets into bloody, bruising fights. Everyone thinks he's started causing trouble again. He gets picked up by the police once, twice for loitering around corners, not wanting to go home. He gets a disappointed call from Sammy - I thought you were staying out of trouble, Jim - and snarls through a promise to do just that.

Jimmy's just barely twelve and he runs away for the first time. It's the middle of January, Iowa. The snow is thick under his boots and he only makes it a couple of miles outside of town before he's stopped on the side of the road. A police officer, a new one, and it's cold enough out that Jimmy allows himself to be taken in without fuss. He tries again when the snow clears, Uncle Frank's fist a lurid purple bruise on his jaw, fingerprints around his wrist. He tries again and again and again, sometimes not even waiting a day between getting caught and setting out again.

It becomes a habit. He gets better at it, gets further, each time, coming up with more creative ways to escape and it all culminates in stealing Uncle Frank's convertible. It's freedom the likes of which he's never felt before. He never wants it to end. Then, for one breathless moment, he's flying, the car diving out from under him and he's weightless in comparison. It feels like he can breathe for the first time in his life. There's nothing holding him down. Just him and the wide, empty sky.

The cliff slams into his chest. There are cuffs around his wrists, papers are signed, and Jimmy is on the first ship out to Iowa 2.0. The reform school calls him Kirk, JT. He runs with it. No one here knows him as Frank's screw up nephew Jimmy. Here he's just one of a couple dozen, so JT he is.

He meets the doctor within a few days of being on the planet. McCoy. Leonard. Bones, JT decides, because the man just sighs and rolls his eyes. He sees Bones several more times after the first. Fights. Although, JT doesn't start them anymore. He finishes them. He's come a long way from the kid who couldn't breathe on his own. Then he meets Spock and is introduced to a wide range of racial discrimination that he hadn't been aware of before. Spock is fifteen, but he doesn't mind hanging out with a mouthy twelve year old and Jimmy starts signing for the first time in years.

JT doesn't so much hear about the blight as he realizes the school's crops are failing. The school receives a packet of ration cards all at once. They're a ragtag bunch of humans and aliens all between the ages of mostly between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. They've all been in trouble with the law in one form or another. The teachers get yellow cards. The students get white.

It takes JT meeting up with Spock a few days after the cards are passes out that the color distinction isn't because of age.


End file.
